Customized GPR system for railroad track verification

Railway is nowadays considered as the most ecological and economical alternative to cars and planes; on the other hand, in order to be really competitive, trains have to go faster and faster on safe tracks that allows an high velocity. From this point of view, speedy track construction is just as important as periodic maintenance and methods of the past (such as coring and visual inspection) are not longer able to provide helpful information especially because too slow and, often, too expensive. Therefore, the use of a Ground Penetrating Radar can be thought as a suitable and economical alternative to the other survey methods. In this paper is presented a GPR equipment especially designed for inspecting and verifying railroad tracks in a reliable and effective way, without interruption of regular traffic.